Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Saturday, December 08, 2012

Well, Yah!! Go Over the "Cliff"

As Barry 'splains, it's really not a big deal, except to the MFM and a number of bloodsucking politicians (principally SCOAMF and his cabal.)

...The term refers to the deal that Congress made in late 2011 to
temporarily resolve the debt ceiling debate. The “sequestration,” as it
is known, calls for three elements: tax increases, spending cuts and an
increase to the payroll tax (FICA). The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has
run the numbers and finds “$180 billion from income tax hikes, $120
billion in revenue from the payroll tax, $110 billion from the
sequester’s automatic spending cuts and $160 billion from expiring tax
breaks and other programs.”

That is a not-insignificant amount of money, but it is hardly the end
of the world. To put this into context, it is a little less than the
TARP bailout for Wall Street in 2009 and somewhat less than the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama’s stimulus package. An
educated guess puts this at about $600 billion to $700 billion out of a
$15 trillion U.S. economy. I’d ballpark that at about 4 percent of the
GDP, or 0.50 percent of the forecasted GDP growth of 2 percent for
calendar year 2013.

The term “fiscal cliff,” popularized by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, is
really a misnomer. As several analysts have correctly observed, the
effects of sequestration are not a Jan. 1, 2013, event. The impact of
the spending cuts and tax hikes would be phased in over time. A fiscal
slope is more accurate. Additionally, as students of history have
learned, single-variable analysis for complex financial issues is
invariably wrong. Because of the inherent complexity of economies and
markets, we cannot adequately explain or predict their behavior by
merely looking at just one variable.

Meh. Taxes go up. Shock!!

Gummint expenditures go down? Nope. It's all smoke-and-mirrors; the "down" is from the ever-increasing 'baseline.' So Gummint expenditures will NOT go down.